This is a blog advocating the overturning and/or ignoring of the controversial IAU planet definition that demoted Pluto, the adoption of a broader planet definition that includes all dwarf planets, and the chronicling of worldwide efforts toward these goals.

Friday, July 15, 2016

Pluto Flyby, One Year Later

Can
it really be a year since that fateful, long-anticipated, wondrous day, July
14, 2015, when New Horizons flew by Pluto, giving humanity its first detailed
glimpse of that mysterious world? One commenter on Facebook said it seems like
just a few months, a sentiment that I share.

One
year ago, after a journey of nine-and-a-half years and three billion miles, the
world witnessed the culmination of a dream that began 25 years earlier and of
two-and-a-half decades of persistence by Pluto scientists to make that dream a
reality.

One year
ago, on one of the most exciting days of my life, I joined thousands of
cheering supporters in a New Year’s Eve-style countdown beginning with “9”
instead of “10,” to 7:49 AM, the moment of the spacecraft’s closest approach.
About 13 hours later, I celebrated with a tired but exuberant crowd at mission
headquarters in Laurel, Maryland, as the spacecraft’s signal that it had
successfully traversed the Pluto system arrived.

I
was blessed to have the opportunity to cover the mission for the website “Spaceflight
Insider,” which allowed me to attend as media and spend the interim hours in
the media area, both writing and talking with scientists and journalists from
around the country and the world.

After
the moment of closest approach had passed, the New Horizons team shared a
fascinating finding with us. It was official: Pluto is bigger than previously
thought, marginally bigger than Eris. In the long run, that might seem trivial,
but it put a definitive end to the claim that Eris is bigger, and if it cannot
be classed as a planet, neither can Pluto. The 2006 estimates of Eris’s size
were wrong; Bruno Sicardy’s 2010 measurements were correct.

We
also were shown the last photo of Pluto sent back before the encounter, so in
case the worst happened, and the spacecraft was destroyed by impact with
debris, at least the mission had some images successfully returned.

It
was a beautiful image, with the heart feature, Tombaugh Regio, front and
center.

Since
then, Pluto has continually surprised everyone, both scientists and lay people.
Numerous predictions were proven wrong. Pluto is not a highly cratered, dead
world but a geologically active one. Its atmosphere is not escaping as it
recedes from the Sun. It has floating mountains and glaciers, ice volcanoes,
and very likely a subsurface ocean.

Pluto’s
interaction with the solar wind is far more like that of the larger planets
than like that of a comet.

Ironically,
every discovery has seemed skewed toward the characteristics of planet, almost
as if Pluto itself were having the last laugh in response to a small number of
astronomers who attempted to classify it without even seeing it.

And
the world became enchanted with Pluto, which made the covers of numerous
newspapers and magazines. Even Google did a special doodle for the flyby.

The
only ones who didn’t seem impressed were those who attended the IAU General
Assembly one month after the flyby. Their biggest concern was that the New
Horizons team was using names for sites on Pluto and its moons without “official”
IAU approval.

Those
wedded to the notion that a planet must “clear the neighborhood of its orbit”
wrote numerous articles stating that the flyby showed an object does not have
to be a planet to be interesting. And therein, they missed the point. All the
features and processes revealed by New Horizons are those of planets. Yet
somehow, none of these intrinsic factors matter to those whose minds are made
up.

By
making “clearing its orbit” a requirement for planethood, four percent of the
IAU essentially assured that no matter what is happening on Pluto’s surface and
atmosphere, no matter what the New Horizons mission found, Pluto would forever
be precluded from being classed as a planet and their position would always “win.”

That
might be a clever political move, but it certainly is not a smart scientific
one, especially since it amounts to reaching a conclusion first and only
afterwards making sure the evidence fits that desired conclusion.

The
fact that New Horizons flew by the Pluto system without encountering any debris
actually calls the claim that it doesn’t clear its orbit into question. Pluto’s
immediate vicinity was likely cleared of debris by its large moon and binary
companion, Charon.

An “un-cleared”
orbit calls to mind the asteroid field navigated by Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back, where the Millennium Falcon has to weave and dodge
to avoid hitting the many asteroids clustered together. This was hardly the
case for New Horizons as it flew through the Pluto system.

One
has to ask, do those who require “orbit clearing” see the entire Kuiper Belt as
Pluto’s “neighborhood?” The Kuiper Belt is huge, most of it stretching far
beyond Pluto. The New Horizons team needed to use the Hubble Space Telescope
just to find an object on the spacecraft’s trajectory to visit after Pluto, and
that object is a billion miles beyond the planet!

Eighty
percent of the data from last year’s flyby is now back, and the remaining 20
percent is expected to be returned sometime this fall.

Pluto
so thrilled and excited the world that there already has been talk of
returning, this time with an orbiter. Principal investigator Alan Stern told
the audience at this spring’s Northeast Astronomy Forum (NEAF) that the
technology for an orbiter already exists.

To
get the ball rolling on a potential orbiter, advocates need to make it a
priority in the next Decadal Survey, a list of goals prepared under the
guidance of the National Research Council once every ten years.

NASA
will start outreach to the council in 2018 or 2019 to begin this process, with
the next Decadal Survey expected to be released in 2022. This means it is not
too early to start seriously advocating a return to the Pluto system.

“I
think Pluto is indeed an object we’re going to need to know more about,” NASA
Director of Planetary Science Jim Green said last year.

“I
think the excitement is there, the details, in terms of the science, will come
out…and they’re going to be pushing for what might be the next steps, you bet.”

For
now, to celebrate this momentous anniversary, the New Horizons mission has
published a list of its top 10 Pluto pictures, a survey of its top ten
discoveries from the flyby, and a stunning video compiled from more than 100
images taken during approach simulating what one would see upon arriving at the
planet.

“Just
over a year ago, Pluto was a dot in the distance. This video shows what it
would be like to ride aboard an approaching spacecraft and see Pluto grow to
become a world, and then swoop down over its particular terrains as if we were
approaching some future landing on them,” Stern said.

About Me

I am a freelance writer and community activist who has worked on many progressive and Democratic political campaigns over the last 25 plus years and a lifelong resident of Highland Park, NJ. I have a BA in Journalism from Rutgers University, an MA in Middle East Studies from Harvard University, and an MEd in English Education from Rutgers Graduate School of Education. An enthusiastic amateur astronomer, I have just completed Swinburne University Astronomy Online's Graduate Certificate of Science in astronomy and am pursuing a Masters of Science in astronomy at Swinburne. I am also an actress with experience in theatre and film and have written a full length play. I am currently working full time on a book "The Little Planet That Would Not Die: Pluto's Story."